Wednesday, October 31, 2007

A Voice from Elsewhere

Maurice BlanchotA VOICE FROM ELSEWHERETranslated by Charlotte Mandell146pp. State University of New York Press. $14.95. 978-0-7914-7016-9

This 1992 essay collection by the French philosopher, novelist and literary critic Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) contains three reflections on poets and one on a philosopher. Quite what connection “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him” (1986) has to the other essays is hard to fathom. The link is perhaps a relation to the Outside: a rejection of subjectivity or “interiority” and a receptivity to what Foucault called the “unimaginable” and René Char, one of the poets examined here, called “la vie inexprimable”. Nevertheless, “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him” marks an almost complete shift of tone from what has gone before, where poetry is the prime concern, in particular “the movement that is the gift of the poem”.

Paul Celan called it “the swelling movement / of words that are always going” and Blanchot’s weighty encounter with Celan, “The Last to Speak” (1984), is surely the best piece here, merging his notion of the Outside with Celan’s concept of the Open. Almost as impressive is “The Beast of Lascaux” (1958), the essay on Char, which begins with a discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus that reads like the seed of Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968). As with Celan, Blanchot admires “the flight of speech” in Char’s work. (He has written elsewhere of Char that “the impossibility of singing itself becomes the song”.) There is a sense, too, that Celan and Char provide a moral bearing for Blanchot, each poet in his own way responding to the menace of Nazism.

The opening essay, “Anacrusis: On the Poems of Louis-René des Forêts”, is a cryptic meditation on music, birth and nonbeing, but it somehow lacks the intensity of Blanchot’s encounters with Char and Celan. The translator Charlotte Mandell appears entirely comfortable with what the Blanchot scholar Leslie Hill has called the “impenetrable clarity” of Blanchot’s prose, but the absence of a contextualising introduction and the spare critical apparatus are a disappointment. In “The Beast of Lascaux” Blanchot suggests a common origin for the language of thought and the language of poetry. They are often indistinguishable in his writing and no more so than in this slim but important collection.

No comments:

POETRY

Ian Pindar's second poetry collection Constellations (Carcanet) is out now. His debut collection Emporium (Carcanet) was shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2012. His poems have appeared in The English Review, The Forward Book of Poetry 2011 and 2012, London Magazine, Magma,New Poetries III, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, Stand, the Times Literary Supplement and Wave Composition. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2009, a supplementary prize in the Bridport Prize 2010 and was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem).

Praise for Constellations

‘The pleasure of Constellations lies in their lyrics’ easy movement among images and observations, their development less linear than cumulative . . . In such denser passages, where the observations leap from one to another in a momentum compelling both for the intriguing train of thought and for the music of the lines, Pindar achieves “a difficult // furthering; intense, informal immediacy” in his distinctive approach to the lyric.’Guardian

‘Pindar’s 88 brilliant new “constellations” are as haunting as they are enigmatic.’Marjorie Perloff, author of 21st-Century Modernism: The 'New' Poetics

Praise for Emporium

‘Pindar is urbane, funny and profound. A brilliant first collection.'Poetry London'There is real gold in this volume . . . I was about to say that Ian Pindar is a promising poet; but no, he is already a significant one.' Poetry Review

'Some of the most hyped poetry in Britain today has been ruthlessly pruned of any phrase that might ignite the slightest grin. Ian Pindar’s first collection, Emporium, is a welcome antidote. It’s dark, witty and entertaining . . . as ingenious as anything I've read for a while, and few collections have been half as entertaining.'Rob A Mackenzie, Magma‘Here's a poetry that's light, clear, at times almostthrowaway, full of political scope and menace.’ Guardian‘Pindar’s inventiveness and sense of linguistic andliterary history make this an enjoyable collection, holding promise for the future.’Boston Review‘It was about time for somebody to be channeling Eliot, maybe Stevens, Laforgue, and the Metaphysicals to such clashing effect: “bright as a seedsman’s packet”, with unexpected timbres and sonorities sabotaged by glockenspiel accents. Pindar is just right for the job.’John Ashbery

‘In this sparkling debut collection Ian Pindar brilliantly fulfils Verlaine’s injunction to the poet to take eloquence and wring its neck. Emporium offers the reader a beguiling and compendious range of styles and voices, and signals the arrival of a fascinating and original poet.’Mark Ford

‘Ian Pindar’s short, crisp and enjoyable new biography [is] an easy-going introduction to the man and a straightforward route into his work, aimed at people who know little about either.’Josh Lacey in the Guardian

‘Pindar manages gracefully to pack a wealth of information into this brief study.’Gerry Dukes in the Irish Independent

‘Pindar has skilfully made the process of understanding the complex relationship between Joyce’s life and work “funagain”.’Eric Bulson in The Times Literary Supplement